We
Are Changed
“Our
consciousness and that of future generations has been changed. We cannot put
the genie back in the bottle.”
Fr.
Richard Rohr
As we emerge
from almost two years in the underworld (if indeed, we are emerging) we are
well aware of being changed. We are a bit like our ancestors who emerged
from a dark cave into bright sunlight and were temporarily blinded. Covid has
changed us just as the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, the flu of 1918, and
polio in the 1940’s-50’s changed life in those times. We are not the same. And
that is not all bad, even though the experience of going through it has been
terrible—and still is.
On the
plus side, the time we have spent in the Covid underworld has caused us to
confront many things that we have historically denied—racial inequality, the
inequities in medical care, the holes in our social network, our dependence on
each other and other countries, and what we are doing to the environment. We
must now look at ourselves and do what the 12-Step programs call a “fearless
moral inventory,” one of the steps toward recovery from addiction. And before
you say, “we’re not addicts,” let's step back and remember that we are the
richest nation on earth, and yet we have people going hungry, living under bridges,
and having no medical care. May we also look around us and assess how much we’ve
spent in the last 2 years at Amazon, Costco, Walmart and how those of us with
means have hundreds of things we neither need nor use.
Our
addiction is like every other addiction—intended to fill a hole in our psyche
with whatever numbs us, whether that is drugs, alcohol or a hundred pairs of shoes.
And now, because we’ve actually had to stop our frenetic busyness long enough to
see what’s here—we wonder, “what was I thinking?” As Fr. Rohr says, we cannot stuff
that genie back into the bottle. And that’s a good thing. It’s time to turn a
corner in America.
If we
want to, we can go back to sleep and pretend this never happened. That almost a
million of us are not dead or permanently impaired. We can blame each other or
the Chinese or we can put our energy into fighting over how money we’ve paid in
taxes should be spent to the point that nothing happens. We can divide up, and throw
stones of blame and shame, or we can put our differences aside, roll up our sleeves
and get busy turning this ship around. Or we can wait until the underworld sucks
us down again and demands our attention.
We have
changed. America has changed. That’s a fact. Now, who will we be going forward?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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